The hypothesis that word representations are emotionally impoverished in a second language (L2) has variable support. However, this hypothesis has only been tested using tasks that present words in isolation or that require laboratory-specific decisions. Here, we recorded eye movements for 34 bilinguals who read sentences in their L2 with no goal other than comprehension, and compared them to 43 first language readers taken from our prior study. Positive words were read more quickly than neutral words in the L2 across (...) first-pass reading time measures. However, this emotional advantage was absent for negative words for the earliest measures. Moreover, negative words but not positive words were influenced by concreteness, frequency and L2 proficiency in a manner similar to neutral words. Taken together, the findings suggest that only negative words are at risk of emotional disembodiment during L2 reading, perhaps because a positivity bias in L2 experiences ensures that positive words are emotionally grounded. (shrink)

Current organizations are underpinned by utilitarian ethics of Modernity. Pure economic motive driven organizations detach themselves from larger societal interest. Rising number of corporate scandals and intraorganizational income inequalities are breeding similar trends in society at large. Current organizations base their competitive advantage on resources and capabilities which boils down to economic supremacy at all cost whether it is named I/o or RBV of the firm. This theoretical article posits Ethics-based Trust as the main competency and capability for attaining sustained (...) competitive advantage. It in no way condemns utility view of the firms but treats it as a natural yet secondary outcome of genuine ethicality of the firm. Cultivating an ethical culture in the firm through identifying antecedents, organizational practices, and the outcomes where profitability is an automatic but secondary outcome under the supremacy of ethics is detailed in the multilevel model presented in this article. The main call of this article is to posit ethics and morality over and above short-term profits so that organizations fulfill their trustee role for society through enacting socio-humanistic theories within organizations. A brief analysis of the proposed ethical theory of firm is undertaken in light of the “schooling” notion in the contemporary organization theory literature. (shrink)

In this paper, we critically interrogate the benefits of an interdisciplinary and theoretically diverse dialogue between ‘local food’ and ‘alternative food networks’ and outline how this dialogue might be enriched by a closer engagement with discourses of food sovereignty and the politics of scale. In arguing for a shift towards a greater emphasis on food sovereignty, we contend that contemporary discourses of food security are inadequate for the ongoing task of ensuring a just and sustainable economy of food. Further, rather (...) than treating the local and the global as ontologically given categories around which to contest the politics of food, it is our contention that recognising the socio-spatial aspects of the politics of scale has the potential to reinvigorate discourses of food security, food sovereignty and AFNs. Understanding scale as both fixed to a degree as well as contingent and dynamic has implications for an understanding of the role of food systems, for how the rescaled state privileges certain food systems and the possibilities for resistance through ‘jumping scale’ and food utopias. All of these aspects are significant if we are to fully comprehend and contest the challenges of envisioning and enacting real utopias of food sovereignty. (shrink)

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

Scientific data are often subjected to two contradictory over-simplifications. People who have no personal experience in science often say that a certain idea has been scientifically established and feel that the question is therewith settled. They do not distinguish among methods, or generalizations in different fields. This implies that all science is infallible. The other oversimplification comes from the specialist; he may dismiss the work of men who study the problems approaching his own but who use methods different from his. (...) This view implies that only one type of scientific investigation is really sound. Both groups are wrong, for science is neither infallible nor wholly untrustworthy. In fact, science as an abstract whole is nothing; it is the name given collectively to all methods which men have used to explore natural processes and the results obtained by the use of such methods. Some problems are sufficiently simple and accessible to be explored in detail while others can be treated only after a set of postulates have been set as a starting point. A mechanism must be established within which it is possible to deal with the problems at hand. In other words, there are levels of scientific research which may be arranged in a series based on increasing assumptions. The more complex levels are formed by assuming the data and methods of those simpler and adding to them a new set of assumptions with the aid of which it is possible to treat the phenomena to be studied. Material cannot be carried directly from one level to another unless attention is given to the premises on which the conclusions have been drawn. Since such attention is not always given, entire fields of research have sometimes been brought into suspicion on the part of those working in what they themselves style “a more fundamental field.” Yet there may be data available at a different level which, when properly used, would be of value in their own work. (shrink)

This essay, written in memory of the Chinese astrophysicist and dissident Fang Lizhi, reexamines the period in Fang's life when he was vice president of the University of Science and Technology of China and, because of his activities as an educational and political reformer, came to be dubbed “China's Andrei Sakharov.” It also retells, from the perspective of an insider, the dramatic narrative of Fang's year with his wife, Li Shuxian, living in the US embassy in Beijing following the Tiananmen (...) Square demonstrations and subsequent massacre. But the special focus of this overview of Fang's career is on his development as a thinker on questions of politics and human rights. Though Fang never returned to China and, while living in the United States, kept his distance from dissident movements, he continued to develop intellectually in ways that made him, in later life, China's Václav Havel. (shrink)

This article examines crowds, leaders, and media after the 1979 Revolution of Iran. It focuses on media that contests hegemonic power by acting as a “guide” for an otherwise “leaderless movement,” especially in contexts where conventional “guides” are illegitimate or absent. It argues that such media reveals the partisan reality of political order obscured by the myth of leadership, the idea that the presence of a leader implies a political order. I focus on International Women’s Day 1979 when crowds protesting (...) the Ayatollah Khomeini’s decision to enforce the mandatory veil were caught in a paradox: as subjects of history and objects of representation. With focus on the non-partisan newspaper _Ayandegan_, the article shows how the crowds, objects of representation, became political subjects, as potential guides. Despite its efforts to remain neutral, _Ayandegan_ became partisan when it unwittingly challenged the “charismatic leader” by giving presence to the partisan crowds. The mediated relation between leader and led on 8 March 1979 and after is instructive for our understanding of the role media can play in leaderless movements. (shrink)

Traditionally, mainstream psychology mostly presented religion in a negative light. However, recent years have witnessed a growing realization that religion has a substantial role to play in improving physical and mental health. Given the importance of religion, the American Psychological Association has division 36 “Psychology of religion.” But the perspective of mainstream psychology does not acknowledge the spiritual nature of human beings and their connection to God. Islamic psychology is one of the religion-based perspectives which acknowledges it. This perspective has (...) also attracted the attention of Western psychologists. Three different trends have been identified in this area: the Islamic filter approach, the comparison approach, and the Islamic psychology approach. However, despite more than 40 years of work, there is a considerable lack of progress in the development of this paradigm. The present article discussed the emergence and challenges in the development of this new perspective. Moreover, we suggest that the research paradigms of Western social and behavioral sciences are useful for developing Islamic psychology. (shrink)

Vagueness in law can lead to indeterminacies in legal rights and obligations. This book responds to the challenges that those indeterminacies pose to theories of law and adjudication.

Predictive processing has begun to offer new insights into the nature of conscious experience—but the link is not straightforward. A wide variety of systems may be described as predictive machines, raising the question: what differentiates those for which it makes sense to talk about conscious experience? One possible answer lies in the involvement of a higher-order form of prediction error, termed expected free energy. In this paper we explore under what conditions the minimization of this new quantity might underpin conscious (...) experience. Our suggestion is that the minimisation of Expected Free Energy is not in itself sufficient for the occurrence of conscious experience. Instead, it is relevant only insofar as it helps deliver what Ward et al. ( 2011 ) have previously described as a _sense of our own poise over an action space_. Perceptual experience, we will argue, is nothing other than the process that puts current actions in contact with goals and intentions, enabling some creatures to know the space of options that their current situation makes available. This proposal fits with recent work suggesting a deep link between conscious contents and contents computed at an ‘intermediate’ level of processing, apt for controlling action. (shrink)

Among the exciting prospects raised by advocates of predictive processing [PP] is the offer of a systematic description of our neural activity suitable for drawing explanatory bridges to the structure of conscious experience. Yet the gulf to cross seems wide. For, as critics of PP have argued, our visual experience certainly doesn’t seem probabilistic.While Clark proposes a means to make PP compatible with the experience of a determinate world, I argue that we should not rush to do so. Two notions (...) of determinacy are conflated in the claim that perception is determinate: ‘univocality’ and ‘full detail’. The former, as Clark argues, is only to be expected in any PP agent that models its world for the purpose of acting on it. But as Husserl argued, and as perceptual psychology has borne out, we significantly overestimate the degree of detail with which we perceive a univocal world.This second form of indeterminacy is due not to the probabilistic nature of PP’s model, but rather to its hierarchical structure, with increasingly coarse-grained representations as we move further from the sensory periphery. A PP system may, or may not, deliver a univocal hypothesis at each of these levels. An action-oriented PP system would only be expected to do so only at the level needed for successful action guidance. A naïve reporter’s overestimation of the degree of determinate detail in their visual experience can thereby be accounted for with a more gradual version of the ‘refrigerator light’ effect: we experience determinate details just to the degree that they’re needed – immediately as they’re needed. (shrink)

La posición de Vico sobre el antiguo Egipto tenía origen en el debate seicentesco sobre la supremacía del saber egipcio . En línea con la historiografía protestante, Vico muestra que los egipcios habían desarrollado sólo un saber civil y que sus conocimientos filosóficos eran aquéllos aprendidos de los hebreos.PALABRAS CLAVE: Vico, hebreos, egipcios, sabiduría antigua, historiografía protestante.Vico’s attitude towards the ancient Egypt had its roots in the Seventeenth Century debate on the supremacy of Egyptian wisdom . In agreement with protestant (...) historiography, Vico shows that Egyptians had only developed a kind of civil knowledge, whereas their philosophical knowledge had been received from Hebrews.KEYWORDS: Vico, Hebrews, Egyptians, ancient wisdom, protestant historiography. (shrink)

Predictive processing accounts of neural function view the brain as a kind of prediction machine that forms models of its environment in order to anticipate the upcoming stream of sensory stimulation. These models are then continuously updated in light of incoming error signals. Predictive processing has offered a powerful new perspective on cognition, action, and perception. In this chapter we apply the insights from predictive processing to the study of emotions. The upshot is a picture of emotion as inseparable from (...) perception and cognition, and a key feature of the embodied mind. (shrink)

This article provides an introduction to plagiarism and the numerous negative aspects associated with it. Some examples from history have also been provided along with their outcomes. There are different types of plagiarism with varying legal and social aspects. The taxonomy of plagiarism is built by classifying it, with respect to the method involved in plagiarism, the form in which it happens or the intention of the plagiarist. The strategies suggested in the literature to avoid plagiarism are organized into individual (...) and organizational levels. Individuals can adopt strategies to build habits of avoiding plagiarism and focus on their original and innovative way of thinking. Similarly, institutions can make policies to cope with plagiarism and hence maintain their reputation. In this paper, the focus is not on mentioning the plagiarism detection methods; rather we believe that building awareness in the people about plagiarism outcomes is more important than teaching them about the different methodologies used for detection. Some students avoid plagiarism detection as if playing a game and it can be only avoided by educating them in ethics. (shrink)

The article argues that a critical encounter with pre-modern literatures from the national past is long overdue under the impact of a globalized discourse of sexuality. Its effects are already felt at the level of both pedagogy and literary reading, one reconstituting the other, in the ‘global classroom’, a self-conscious pedagogical space imagined by the new educational policy to bring about a globally accredited cultural homogeneity. The case study comes from teaching erotic poetry at an Indian university, from the joint (...) literary complex of Hindi and Urdu in South Asia, a theme uncomfortably located in national culture not just because of its sexuality but its association with non-national linguistic elements which the article terms ‘Indo-Islamic’. The overlapping of the sexual modern with the Indo-Islamic resurfaces a tension in the nationalized body of literary writing in Hindi/Urdu, the major ‘national’ languages of South Asia. This encounter of erotic poetry in old Hindi and Urdu with globalized sexuality, the article shows, offers a chance to reflect on how literary studies are being reshaped by the assumptions of a monolingual, monocultural global sexuality in our nationalist times. (shrink)

Should we regard Jennifer Lackey’s ‘Creationist Teacher’ as understanding evolution, even though she does not, given her religious convictions, believe its central claims? We think this question raises a range of important and unexplored questions about the relationship between understanding, factivity and belief. Our aim will be to diagnose this case in a principled way, and in doing so, to make some progress toward appreciating what objectual understanding—i.e., understanding a subject matter or body of information—demands of us. Here is the (...) plan. After some ground clearing in §1, §2 outlines and motivates a plausible working model—moderate factivity—for characterising the sense in which objectual understanding should be regarded as factive. §3 shows how the datum that we can understand false theories can, despite initial suggestions to the contrary, be assimilated straightforwardly within the moderate factivity model. §4 highlights how the inverse kind of case to that explored in §3—viz., a variant of Lackey’s creationist teacher case—poses special problems for moderate factivity. With reference to recent work on moral understanding by Hills, §5 proposes a solution to the problem, and §6 attempts to diagnose why it is that we might originally have been led to draw the wrong conclusion. (shrink)

This study aims to investigate the influence of psychological biases on the investment decision of Chinese individual investors after the pandemic of COVID-19 with a moderating role of information availability. A cross-sectional method with a quantitative research approach was employed to investigate the hypothesized relationships among variables. The snowball sampling technique was applied to collect the data through a survey questionnaire from individual investors investing in the Chinese stock market. Smart-PLS statistical software was used to analyze the data and for (...) the estimation of hypotheses. Results indicated that overconfidence, representative bias, and anchoring bias have a significant and positive influence on investment decisions during the post-Covid-19 pandemic; however, the availability bias has insignificant and negative effects on the investment decision during the post-COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, findings indicated that information availability has a significant moderating role in the relationship of psychological biases with the investment decision during the post-COVID-19 pandemic. This study contributes to the body of knowledge regarding behavior finance, psychological biases, and investment decision in emerging stock markets. The findings of the present study improve the understanding that how investors’ psychology affects their investment decisions. (shrink)

There is a long tradition in philosophy of using a priori methods to draw conclusions about what is possible and what is necessary, and often in turn to draw conclusions about matters of substantive metaphysics. Arguments like this typically have three steps: first an epistemic claim , from there to a modal claim , and from there to a metaphysical claim.

This article aims to analyse a possible manner of approaching the birth of intersexual children. We start out by summing up what intersexuality is and how it is faced in the dominant clinical practice. We then argue against this paradigm, in favour of a postponement of genital surgery. In the second part of this paper, we take into consideration the general question of whether only two existing sexes are to be recognized, arguing in favour of an expansion of sex categories. (...) In the third part, we illustrate the reasons supporting provisional sex attribution: the child’s best interest and respect for their developing moral autonomy. This position aims to increase the child’s well-being and self-determination, limiting parents’ freedom to take decisions on behalf of others, in particular, those decisions concerning basic aspects of their children’s personal identity. (shrink)

Given that personal source of information is preferred by the customers over company-generated marketing communications, promoting advocacy behavior among customers is of much importance for every organization. Literature suggests that an organization's corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities significantly influence individual behavior. However, the advocacy behavior of customers (ADB), from a CSR perspective, did not receive due attention. To address this literature gap, the current study attempts to explore the relationship among CSR and ADB with the intervening role of brand admiration (...) (BA). To collect the data, customers of a large fast-food service organization in Pakistan were approached. The proposed relationships were tested through the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. The statistical evidence verifies a positive link between CSR and ADB, while BA mediated this relationship. These findings will be supportive to the fast-food business to realize the critical role of CSR for a meaningful customer-company relationship in the face of competition. (shrink)

In this article, I use ethnographic and historical evidence to consider marriage as a particular locus of what Maria Lugones has called “the colonial/modern gender system.” By bringing specific research on marriage among the matrilineal Asante of Kumasi, Ghana, together with a consideration of global ideals of marriage and gender, I argue that marriage and the family are key sites through which the subjugation of women in Africa can be understood, but that this requires local and historical contextualization. To do (...) this, I trace the emergence and current local expression of “companionate marriage,” an ideal of marriage that is associated with romantic love and personal choice, and that is often seen as a gender-progressive marriage ideal. In Kumasi, “companionate” ideals began to emerge during the colonial period, not as an empowering force, but in complicated interactions with other gendered changes that limited wives' claims to husbands' reciprocal support and isolated women from their matrilineal kin. Today, customary marriage is often considered harmful to women and distinct from other forms of marriage; however, I show that such assumptions impose categorial differences where none may exist, and occlude the complexities of women's lives and struggles. (shrink)

Based on our prior work (Neuman and Nave, in press [a]) we proceed from the notion that the mind has the capacity to generate and use concepts through themediation of signs. This mediation constrains the vast potential for confusion, given the incalculable number of similarities between objects in the world and therefore has important adaptive value. Despite the ubiquity of sign-mediated concept formation (SMCF), a rigorous formalization of this phenomenon is rare. Following the work of Neuman and Nave (...) (in press [a]), here we present a formal description of sign-mediated concept formation and discuss the relevance of this theory to certain outstanding issues in biology, psychology and Artificial Intelligence (AI). (shrink)

Living out of silence, out of a fully functioning, lovingly attentive mind, and not just out of thought, out of a partially functioning mind, is requisite for depth or profundity in living or relating. A fully attentive, truly silent or meditative mind sees that there is real dualism of time and the timeless and that time and the timeless each has its own unique value. The timeless, or real silence, that which alone can make for depth in one's living and (...) relating, can be there only when, in one's awareness, time and all that is related to time, have come to an end. An examination of a wide variety of statements made by writers, both past and present, shows that these understandings are seldom there in contemporary writings, just as they were not there in writings that have come down to us from the past. 'Living beyond the One and the Many' invites readers to consider the possibility that what is presented in it can bring deep meaning to one's way of living in the world"--Publisher's description, back cover. (shrink)

Unlike machines, living systems are distinguished by the continual destruction and regeneration of their boundaries and other components. Stable Markov blankets may be a real feature of the world, or they may be merely a construction of particular models, but they are neither a feature of organisms nor of any model that can capture the necessary conditions of their existence.

The current research investigates the interplay of board gender diversity, the quality of corporate social responsibility disclosure, and the green innovation performance of a firm. It examines the moderation effect of the CSRD on the relationship between corporate GIP and BGD. The study inculcates 3,736 firm-year observations of A-share listed Chinese firms from 2010 to 2019. Least square dummy variables method, generalized method of moments, and 2SLS are employed for the analysis of the study. The findings foster an affirmative and (...) significant impact of BGD on corporate GIP in terms of green innovation patents. Moreover, the quality of CSRD is also detected for a significant moderating effect on the relationship between BGD and corporate GIP. The quality of CSRD emerges to be an indicator for social resilience and female role congruence under the purview of the social resilience theory and the role congruence theory, respectively. This research would help managers and policymakers of developing nations in formulating environmental innovation strategies for corporate sustainability. (shrink)

It's often said that it's highly improbable that evolution should produce complex beings such as ourselves. But is it? Here is a welcome clarification of how to weigh up probabilities — particularly when it comes to evolution.

Protagoras, of all the ancient philosophers, has perhaps attracted the most interest in modern times. His saying ‘Man is the measure of all things’ caused Schiller to adopt him as the patron of the Oxford pragmatists, and has generally earned him the title of the first humanist. Yet the exact delineation of his philosophcal position remains a baffling task. Neumann, writing on Die Problematik des ‘Homo-mensura’ Satzes in 1938,2 concludes that no certainty whatever can be reached on the meaning of (...) the dictum, since ‘man’, ‘measure’, and ‘things’ are all ambiguous, nor can we tell which of the three is the predicate. The time is past when it was believed that a man's philosophy could be understood apart from the events of his life and the circumstances of his age: yet in the case of Protagoras the historical method of approach has hardly been attempted, although the impact of environment was perhaps more decisive in the formation of philosophical concepts in the Greek world than anywhere else. The reality about which the Greek philosopher spoke had three aspects: it was either the one universe of physics, or the political unity, or God. For example, the book of Heracleitus Περ φσεως was divided into three chapters or logoi, About the Whole, a political, and a theological. Neither physics nor theology supplies from its own subject-matter the form in which this reality was described. (shrink)